A powerfully intimate look at how the justice system works—or doesn’t work—in capital cases.
A veteran journalist focuses on a grisly murder case to explore the legal issues that commonly arise in our ongoing national debate about capital punishment.
In 1982, the stabbed, beaten and bloodied body of widow Dorothy Edwards was discovered stuffed in a closet in her Greenwood, S.C., home. Within 90 days, a local African-American handyman, Edward Lee Elmore, was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to death. The dim-witted, mentally retarded 23-year-old insisted from the beginning on his innocence. However, following appeals, two more juries said he was guilty. A talented, relentless handful of appellate attorneys—including one, Diana Holt, whose turbulent life story is book-worthy by itself—argued over a period of 22 years that Elmore had been deprived of a single fair trial. Aside from the defendant’s minority race and poverty, predictable constants on any state’s death row, the lawyers turned up a series of disturbing irregularities, some of which occur in any capital case, all of which applied to Elmore: the sloppy crime-scene investigation by law-enforcement officials; their mishandling, mischaracterizing and perhaps even planting of evidence; the ineffective assistance of trial counsel, who failed to interview key witnesses and to vigorously test the state’s evidence; the inexperience or imperiousness of judges failing properly to instruct the jury; the zeal of prosecutors, more desirous of victory than of doing justice, who withheld possibly exculpatory evidence. The story also features jailhouse snitch testimony (recanted), arguments over DNA testing and a tantalizing, circumstantial case against an Edwards neighbor. Pulitzer Prize winner Bonner (At the Hand of Man: Peril and Hope for Africa’s Wildlife, 1993, etc.) weaves all this together with discussions of pertinent Supreme Court opinions, capsule tales of other, relevant capital cases and sharp mini-portraits of the case’s lawyers and judges. A last-minute stay of execution and a 2005 writ of habeas corpus that successfully argued Elmore could not be killed under the Supreme Court’s 2002 Atkins decision, prohibiting execution of the mentally retarded, spared him from the electric chair. He remains in prison.
A powerfully intimate look at how the justice system works—or doesn’t work—in capital cases.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-70021-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Even in death Oscar Wilde could still provoke upright society, as this lively and revealing history of a bizarre 1918 libel trial in London, concerning a play by Wilde, demonstrates. Focusing on the scandal surrounding the first British performance of Wilde’s last play, SalomÇ, Hoare, the biographer of Stephen Tennant (1991) and Noâl Coward (1996), wonders what Wilde would have made of the early 20th century. A byword for unnameable perversity to the Edwardian middle class, Wilde had become a martyr figure for the decadent underground, which continued with desperate hedonism during WW I. The headline-making trial that SalomÇ touched off suggests that, even in 1918, public opinion would still not have been friendly to Wilde. Noel Pembleton Billing, the right-wing publisher of the yellow journals the Imperialist and the Vigilante, and a loose-cannon member of Parliament, needed to maintain his maverick political career, even through proto-McCarthyite tactics. He had already claimed that the Germans had a list of 47,000 high-ranking members of the government, the military, the aristocracy, and society (all of them secret homosexuals) who were being blackmailed into sabotaging the war effort. Why not suggest that a new production of SalomÇ, starring the scantily clad dancer Maud Allan, was a Hunnish effort to undermine public morality? When he ran a ferocious attack on the play headlined “The Cult of the Clitoris” (not a term many readers knew), the producers took legal action. The ensuing circus of a court case, with Billing conducting his own manic defense, dug up Wilde for public obloquy again, this time with Lord Alfred Douglas leading the attack on his former lover. It also revealed that mainstream attitudes toward homosexuality, morality, and aestheticism had changed little since Wilde’s death in 1900. Expanding an unlikely historical footnote, this account of Wilde’s posthumous last trial and its wider significance is sensational in more than just the journalistic sense of the word. (For more Wilde-iana, see Merlin Holland, The Wilde Album, p. 259.) (24 pages b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55970-423-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A psychiatrist who meets the criminally insane tells all. Lewis, a professor at New York University and Yale, spends a good deal of time examining the most violent among us. Her specialty is violent children, but over the years she has also met with adults. Her subjects include Arthur Shawcross, who mutilated and ate his victims, and Ted Bundy, who kissed her goodbye shortly before his execution. Lewis has clearly seen and heard a great deal, and she’s unsparing in the details of what makes a child violent. As expected, she finds that poverty and abuse are strong indicators of a tendency toward violence, and she writes movingly of one little girl who became a murderer after her family repeatedly ignored her cries for help. Not every child in those situations becomes a law-breaker, but years of abuse combined with inattentive medical care can lead to serious behavioral problems and terrible violence. Lewis early on makes the point that she has often identified more with a killer waiting to be executed than with society, which she believes makes her more sensitive to those who kill. This approach has limited appeal, however, and the book often veers between overly long sections on Lewis’s background and and relationships with colleagues and her parents, and too little real analysis. The reader is left with excellent insights into Lewis’s own modus operandi, but not much in the way of a true understanding of what makes an abused child turn into a Ted Bundy. Like Barbara Kirwin’s The Mad, The Bad, and The Innocent, this book focuses too much on the analyst. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-449-00277-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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